By Beryl Lieff Benderly
How do successful feature writers come up with the "lightbulb" ideas that become compelling articles? Journalists Florence Williams and Amanda Little (who also teaches journalism at Vanderbilt University) and Wired deputy editor Adam Rogers presented a variety of ways of sparking the process. All agreed that the challenge is shaping a topic — a large or general subject — into a focused story.
For Little, "backdoor" approaches have repeatedly led to what she considers the "real story." She began her career writing about tech and IT, but eventually realized that the central story she wanted to deal with was the need for energy, which ultimately led her to science and environmental reporting. She continues to use roundabout means to get to the stories she wants to do, getting onto an oil rig, for example, as a means of getting to deeper issues about energy. Getting "inside things," she says, requires following a chain of contacts from source to source until she gets to the character or event that opens what she considers the "main story."
Williams takes what is in a sense an opposite approach, getting many stories from a single, central topic. The work that became her book Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, began with an Interest in flame retardants that were appearing in breast milk. Toxicology proved a tough sell to editors, but she overcame the problem when she realized she could "couch toxicology" in terms of "boobs," which were "sort of marketable," and in fact turned in "boobzilla." She is now turning material from her book into podcasts, which takes a different method of shaping stories. For example, rather than quoting from Desmond Morris's book The Naked Ape, as she did in her book, she has, through using his voice, made him a character in her podcast.
For magazine editor Adam Rogers, the task of turning topics into stories is "slicing" them to create a story structure. One approach is focusing on a character who is trying to accomplish something difficult against obstacles. Another is to focus on an important change that is happening within the field of interest. A third is to identify cinematic scenes that would take the reader to a place or follow a linage of action. A topic is the context for a story, he said. The story, on the other hand, could intersperse scenes with billboard sections providing explanation.
Time management emerged as an important issue in the discussion, because journalists must decide how much research to do before feeling ready to query editors about the potential story. The temptation to over-research is great, Little and Williams agreed, because it is generally fascinating and also because making the right connections can take a great deal of effort.
The session's moderator, journalist Hillary Rosner, emphasized, however, that contacting editors with ideas is not wasting the editors' time, but rather allowing them to do their job, which is to find articles to put in their magazines. Rogers added that contacting an editor to discuss ideas will generally produce a "yes," which will help you to develop your ideas into pitches that result in assignments.
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